Re: Procmail filtering question

Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> Wed, 27 May 2020 14:33:40 +0300
Newsgroups	gmane.mail.fetchmail.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 11:53:07AM +0100, Richard Kimber wrote:
> On Tue, 26 May 2020 16:39:04 +0300
> Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Unfortunately, this is the most "normal" of the formats that you are
> > going to get with e-mail. Since none of the software that generates or
> > reformats e-mail messages along the way has any idea what other
> > software will be used to accept, transfer, or process the message,
> > none of it can rely on anything else being able to process anything
> > other than "simple" plain text with all characters being in the
> > US-ASCII character set. Thus, if somebody wants to include, say, a
> > pretty long dash or chevrons, the only way to do that is to use a
> > special format for encoding them, a special format for saying "this
> > here is a character that is outside the US-ASCII character set, I'll
> > tell you how it is represented in UTF-8, but since its UTF-8
> > representation itself depends on bytes that are outside the US-ASCII
> > character set, here's a marker that says that the next couple of
> > characters are base64-encoded representations of UTF-8 encoded
> > characters".
> > 
> > Anything that wants to process e-mail messages the way they are to be
> > displayed to the end-user should be able to decode MIME-encoded
> > content, including MIME-encoded header fields. And... unfortunately,
> > here we come once again to the "procmail is kind of outdated, it does
> > not really support a couple of things that are sort of essential in
> > the current world, is there any way you might switch to other
> > message-filtering software?" For example, it looks like at least
> > courier-maildrop may be configured to parse MIME-encoded headers:
> > http://courier-mail-server.10983.n7.nabble.com/Filtering-mails-with-UTF-8-headers-td18177.html
> > (and yes, I know that switching the mail filtering program is not
> > trivial at all, but procmail also has other problems, some of which
> > people have become accustomed to working around for decades...)
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> I was wondering, though, whether one could do something like
> mda '/usr/bin/formail -s <program that converts to ascii> | procmail'
> in the .fetchmailrc file.

...but the whole point is that this encoding means that the subject
contains non-ASCII characters. There is no way to convert them to
ASCII.

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
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